On Wednesday November 7, 2012 at 8pm/PST (11pm/EST) we welcome Thomas Smith & Darrell Williams, author and subject of the newly released book Which One Am I?. Join us as we sit down with these two interesting friends of ours and learn about the road traveled to get to where they are today. Darrell’s unique story needed to be told and only someone as close to him as Tom could have written it in the proper perspective. This is sure to be a powerful interview about a life of discovery, disappointment, love and acceptance. How does one deal with being the outsider, living a life with many questions and few answers? Can a person know the intimate details of family incidents that occurred prior to their birth? You’ll want to tune in and hear Darrell’s remarkable story, we’re sure you’ll be captivated. After our interview we’ll be up to all of our usual fun with our Brewskis beer tasting segment, beer trivia, TBones Timeout, pigskin picks, followed by our take on all topics, as well as any interesting news of the day. Swoop’s World Late Night is on from 8pm/PST – 11pm/PST tune in at Swoopsworld.com.

Which One Am I?

There are at least 16 personalities inside James Darrell Williams. But who is he really? And why? “Which One Am I?” is a singular story about universal truths, horrors and grace. Setting their work apart from other memoirs, the authors explore the nature of family and how Darrell – and all of us — are shaped by culture, history and geography. After two years of research, Darrell and his partner Thomas Smith dug deeply into family secrets, Southern culture and Darrell’s own psyche to explore portrayals of Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) in popular culture and the psychiatric community, linking them with the events that made Darrell the man he is.

Forward

This isn’t the way Darrell’s story was supposed to unfold. But you could say that just about anybody’s life.

At its core, this is the chronicle of the life of James Darrell Williams. This is how he has grown up with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID), a disorder being by definition “An ailment that affects the function of mind or body.” More importantly, this story is of how and why he developed what neither of us particularly considers an “ailment” and how he came to become the man he is today. Initially, Darrell and I were attempting to explain Darrell to himself. We needed to explore how Darrell came to have these multiple personalities, these people inside him that exist and live along with him.

Along the way, the story became something quite different and not at all what we expected. The “why” of it all tended to be buried in layers of psychology, sociology, history, geography and family secrets that no one wanted to tell. Explaining what happened became much more complicated.

History is told by its survivors: Roald Amundsen’s South Pole expedition, the Donner Party, Billy Milligan. They leave historians with nothing more than scribbled notes, selective memory and inadvertent admissions. To recreate what really happened requires deductive reasoning, a fair number of educated guesses and the ability to listen between the lines. History is something people only half remember.

We always knew telling Darrell’s story was going to be somewhat difficult. To live, survive and ultimately thrive with DID is to live life out of time. Each day is a movie constructed from previews and outtakes with reels all out of order. We wanted to splice the pieces together, fill in the gaps and make sense of it all.

That was my job. Trained as a journalist, I was privy to contacts and resources that Darrell had never heard of. I wanted to tell how his experience was effected by his particular geography, sociology and setting. Darrell and the “kids” – his term for the people who live inside him — just wanted their story told – and told right. There are big kids and little kids, all of them shadows behind Darrell’s hazel eyes. We want to make sure this book allows them to feel safe, understood and accepted.

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